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After closing its Theatre Museum, the V&A is to shut its musical-instruments gallery next month. Unsurprisingly, they haven't trumpeted this move.

The musical-instruments room includes the earliest surviving harpsichord, the oldest known chromatic harp made in the United Kingdom, Rossini's recorder and the Virgin Queen's virginals.

Now it is to make way for more fashion displays. Let's be blunt: fashion can attract sponsors, but there's not much chance of, say, Steinway backing the music gallery. So most of the instruments will be put into storage, though a few may go in other rooms or find a home at the Horniman Museum, in southeast London.

Serendipity has been one of the joys of the V&A. The other evening, I was trying to find the reception for David Dimbleby's new art series, Seven Ages of Britain, which begins tonight on BBC1, when I got temporarily lost in a gallery of paintings I